Is Obama’s victory news? Traackr predicted it back in January!
We’re usually not into bragging. Let this be the exception: didn’t Traackr tell you back in January that Barack Obama was on his way to win the democratic primary boosted by his social media strategy? Here, let’s refresh your memory.
Back then, Obama’s popularity and buzz scores on Traackr were already off the chart while the poll numbers still showed Clinton very much ahead.
We later provided a more thorough analysis of Obama, Clinton, and McCain’s social media strategies (or lack thereof) to explain more qualitatively what Obama did differently that made him more successful with social media.
We won’t go as far as saying that we have a crystal ball in Traackr’s score, but interpreted the right way, our scoring system can be a good predictor of future trends.
Stay tuned as we’ll start looking into the McCain-Obama contest next!
Tags: candidates, clinton, election08, mccain, obama
June 4th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
If the error in this logic isn’t already obvious, then try this:
“Is Obama’s victory news? My grandmother predicted it back in January!”
June 4th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Rick, I don’t know what your grandmother wrote or said back in January. On January 16th, we wrote this in this blog: “We would posit that Obama’s online buzz, as measured by Traackr, might serve as a good predictor of future progress throughout the campaign.”
You can find the full article by following the link we provided in the post above that you must have missed. We’re in the business of measuring success on social media, no way we’d expect you to just take our word on this.
June 4th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate your perspective. And I also appreciate the perspective of the news consumer (like me) who hears many predictions from many sources. Over time, some predictions prove true, others false. It’s the law of averages, and there’s nothing newsworthy about the law of averages doing its job (e.g., Dog Bites Man). However, if a predictor were to be correct more than, say, 90% of the time, then I think we’d be onto something.
I should apologize for what could appear as sarcasm in my earlier post.
June 5th, 2008 at 8:16 am
You are absolutely right and only time will tell if and how we’re able to use the data we gather to forecast trends reliably. One thing is for sure, we won’t ever be able to rely on the data solely as we need to place them in context for our scores to make sense. Stay tuned for more. Also, if you’re interested in the topic, Hubdub just launched PunditWatch that tracks forecasts by the major bloggers. It came out yesterday and is already contentious
http://punditwatch.hubdub.com/